Many service organizations need to dynamically allocate their service agents in order to attain certain goals. Such allocation is typically performed manually. Increasingly, external performance measures of service delivered dominate internal cost measures, such as utilization and labor costs. Such external measures often consist of classifying certain transactions into meeting or not meeting desired objectives and determining a proportion of those transactions meeting objectives. Such a proportion is called a service level. The service level is measured over some period of time or over some number of transactions.
Examples of service levels are the percentage of customer problems resolved without further activity, the percentage of dispatched taxicabs that reach the rider within the committed time, the proportion of telephone calls handled by a qualified representative without requiring a transfer or referral to another agent, the proportion of telephone calls that can be connected to an agent without delay, the proportion of e-mail requests that are answered within 24 hours, the percentage of on-time departures of city buses on a particular bus route on weekdays, the proportion of transactions handled not resulting in a customer complaint, the proportion of preferred customer calls handled by fully qualified agents, the percentage of Spanish speakers handled by an agent fluent in Spanish, the percentage of telephone calls not abandoned by the customer before connection to an agent, the percentage of customer inquiry telephone calls that are not blocked at the central office switch, the percentage of customer sessions with the self-service World Wide Web pages that are not aborted while waiting for a display, the percentage of customer requests via telephone that can be completed immediately while on the phone, the percentage of loan applications processed within one-half hour from the time of the request, and the percentage of priority telephone calls answered within 8 seconds and handled properly by a qualified agent.
A service organization's goal for a service level in this context is a particular desired value of the service level. The goal is said to be satisfied if the attained service level is at least as high as the desired service level for the goal. It is said to be unattained if the realized service level is less than the desired service level. For example, the goal of at least 85% of telephone calls from preferred customers each day being answered within 12 seconds would be attained if, among the telephone calls from preferred customers during the current day, 87% were answered within 12 seconds; inversely, if only 84% of such calls are answered within 12 seconds, the goal would be unattained. In this framework the goal is either attained or not. There is considered to be no extra benefit to attain a service level much higher than the goal.
The number of server resources allocated to a type of service often affects the service level achieved for that type of service. Usually, when such is the case the operation can reallocate servers to the subject work in order to achieve service level goals. Such reallocation generally incurs opportunity cost, however, since service levels for other work suffers. One can often justify this opportunity cost based on an appropriate priority hierarchy.
For example, suppose agents in a call center can handle both loan servicing and sales servicing transactions. When more agents are assigned to sales activities, sales servicing transactions experience a higher service level on answer delay--that is, the amount of time required to answer each sales call declines. Meanwhile, the loan servicing calls are not answered as promptly, reducing the service level for loan servicing transactions. The service organization may rationalize this by saying that loan servicing is relatively less important because it is not very likely that an existing customer will switch loan companies, and that the company presently needs to acquire new customers that could easily take their business to a competitor if their calls are not answered promptly. The service organization wants to satisfy the goal of loan servicing, but not at the expense of failing to reach the goal in sales. When the sales goal is not in jeopardy, but the loan servicing is failing to meet its goal, the service organization desires to allocate more resources to loan servicing. The service organization wants to meet both goals, but the sales goal is more important than the loan servicing goal and so may preempt it. That is, if the operation can only meet one goal it should be the sales goal.
The desire to allocate more server resources to some activity is typically contingent upon the alternative activities that the server resources can perform and the demand for such alternative activities. Each of these alternative activities is also potentially associated with various service levels, each of which has a goal and a level of attainment. So the reallocation of resources can depend upon service measures for all alternative work associated with each of the resources. Performing such a potentially complex allocation function manually can produce significantly sub-optimal results. Often the manual allocation is too late and leads to more problems when the reallocated agents are not returned to their preferred work soon enough.
The advent of skills-based server allocation, in which the skills of each individual server are considered in allocating servers, complicates the situation. This approach cannot tolerate simplifying fragmentation of resources into monolithic pools where distinguishing skills are ignored. For this reason, conventional automatic call distributors ("ACDs") fail to meet this need.
In this environment, the service organization wants to provide preferential treatment to work activities in a hierarchy that ensures that the best work item is given to a server in view of attained service levels and the stated priorities of service level goals. An automated system that distilled this information would have significant utility.